Pro-Palestinian protesters occupying Barnard College’s campus library were evacuated Wednesday after a bomb threat was called into the building.
Nine protesters were arrested at the scene as dozens of NYPD officers entered Milstein Library. The bomb threat was deemed not credible.
On Thursday, in response to the incident, Barnard announced a series of toughened campus security measures, restricting the campus to student ID holders, requiring students to remove masks upon entering the library and raising the possibility of bag checks, the Columbia Spectator reported.
“Today has been unsettling and disturbing, and these continued disruptions take a toll on our community,” Barnard President Laura Rosenbury wrote in an email to the school, according to the Spectator. “The desire of a few to disrupt and threaten cannot outweigh the needs of the students, faculty, and staff who call our campus home.”
The protest was the second time pro-Palestinian students had occupied a campus building at the Manhattan school. One week ago, protesters occupied an administration building and assaulted a college employee who was sent to the hospital. The demonstrations are protesting the expulsion of students who disrupted an Israeli history class at Columbia in January and handed out fliers showing a boot stomping on a Star of David.
Barnard’s student government condemned the entry of police officers to campus, writing in a statement that the college administration “has broken a long standing promise” not to invite the NYPD to the school.
“We have seen the images. We have watched the videos. We bear witness to our fellow students, our friends, brutalized and silenced for speaking up on our own campus,” the statement said. “The Barnard Student Government Association strongly condemns the presence of NYPD on campus.”
Columbia has been an epicenter of the pro-Palestinian protest movement since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, which launched the war in Gaza. Last year, the school was the birthplace of the nationwide encampment movement.
The recent protests have already caused national fallout. This week, the White House floated halting more than $50 million in federal contracts with Columbia over the school’s “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students.” And Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar who served as the State Department’s antisemitism envoy under the Biden administration, said she declined a teaching offer at Columbia over “a completely unacceptable situation” regarding campus antisemitism.
Rep. Ritchie Torres, the New York Democrat and pro-Israel stalwart, posted video appearing to show fliers at the protest that glorified the Oct. 7 attack. He called for students to be expelled.
“The pro-Hamas agitators, who were proudly distributing pro-Hamas propaganda in defense of October 7th, not only orchestrated a hostile takeover of Barnard College but also subsequently kept the administrators from evacuating the building in the midst of a bomb threat,” he posted on X. “Barnard College should expel every single one of these students for endangering the safety of the campus.”
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